In its current issueLinux Magazine published an article (PDF) about playlist management with JuK. For starters: JuK is KDE's outstanding playlist-based jukebox application with a lot of unique and powerful features. The article talks about playlist management, advanced tag guessing with musicbrainz and how to keep your music collection consistant easily.
Author Scott Wheeler has also been interviewed earlier by Andreas C. Diekmann.

I've loved Juk since I discovered it a few weeks ago. The only thing it's missing (apart from support for .mpc) is an upcoming playlist. I imagine this would be an optional interface extra, that would let people drag songs they want played next onto the upcoming list. This saves the hassle of creating a regular playlist which is, imo, unsuited for something that's only ever going to be played once!

This would be great at a party. You could set a "double click" to "add to upcoming" and then you just double click the song you want and it goes onto the list, a seperate window could show what's coming next with half the screen and dissapears when someone moves the mouse.... or soemthing like that. This combined with Juk's clean, clear interface, ANYONE would be to sit down and use it without any instructions.

I accidentally left my JuK running last night (the speakers were off) and when I just got in there were 22 Krash dialogs on my screen. artsd has a nasty habit of crashing on some mp3s and Juk got into a loop. It's a testament to the durability that JuK can just keep playing anyway. (The GStreamer plugin has even worse crashing problems and puts 3 second gaps between each mp3 to boot).

Still, great program. Love the musicbrainz stuff. I just wish there was some way to give back to the server.

Hey there, JuK is a really nice software.
But it really lacks important features that the app wxMusik brings.
Its really sad to see both of them having nice features not implemented in the other.
Why not merge the efforts to do the best open source mp3 collection manager?

I don't get the point when many similar open source softwares exists and get maintained over the time.
I understand the choice and the diversity is important.
But in a open source "world" (community), if the feature is not available or something is bugged, It is POSSIBLE to EASILY REPORT IT or WRITE A PATCH FOR IT.
Then the software is better and still open for more improvement. No wasted energy in starting a whole new project because you CAN help for the existing one.
When the software is closed, I understand its temptating to start on a new project, but it is not the case here.
No need for choice when the best of the these choices can be integrated in the same thing.

Isnt that logic?

I'd like to see my idea critized because I really wonder why there is many open projects that are similar and who still get developped apart one from each other.

It has always been my assumption that wxMusic is primarily targetting Windows -- this is based on the fact that I've never even managed to get it built on Linux. It doesn't use standard configure tools; the makefiles have the authors home directory path hard coded in them; it's missing required files, etc.

It's also using a proprietary, binary only sound backend, which I find to be unacceptable.

But you're going after the age old Open Source debate here -- why do people do it at all? You assume that everyone has the same goals for software that you do, but this really isn't the case at all. There is no single reason that people develop OSS software; the closest you really can get to an answer is "because they want to" (though even that isn't always true). As disappointing as this may be OSS authors generally aren't working on the stuff primarily for your amusement. ;-) People work on projects because they like their way of doing things or think that there are things that they can do better or just differently an so on. That's the essence of the "bazaar" in Open Source development. Lots of things happen in parallel and they gradually evolve towards better software.

And finally you're kind of asking in the wrong place as JuK has been around for a few years longer than wxMusic.

As disappointing as this may be OSS authors generally aren't working on the stuff primarily for your amusement.

My main point was: When programmers decide to code an app and use an open source licence for it. The step of making the app open sourced is usefull to the society and science at large. But I think it is never as usefull as if the programmer took the little extra (important) energy needed to care about current existing choices. And then, maybe try to help out developping a project already on the way.
Letting the sources open is a proof of non-egoism from the coder, which should be positive.
But how much better is it if the people work together!

To come back to the quote I pasted at the beginning, I know I'm not enough self-centered to think people code and licence app as open source primarily for my amusement.

You maybe misunderstood me (as I don't write english very well), but what I was saying is: open and respected standards, associated with coders working in cooperation, would enormously profit to everyone.

I understand when you say people like to do things their way, and coders around the world like this create the open source bazaar as you named it. But big projects like KDE as you are yourself participing coulnt exist if there wasnt any cooperation around standards between coders.

The ways to structure an application when desinging/coding should not be left to the programmer's habits and tastes. Considering the computers and softwares as a SCIENCE. Even an really exact science. (think physics theories that are almost philosophical ideas). Everything being a 0 or a 1, there is aways the BEST way to acheive a goal on a computer. There is ALWAYS a best and only way to program something. Of course the perfect program for one user won't be the same for the other. This is the desktop world of softwares (rudely, compared with the very sharp apps needed for scientific-only computations). The goal here is to build the best customizable base for the end users. Having the choice of 5 jukebox softwares is probably less good than having one, very modular and extensible program using a standards who can be modified to fit the new needs.

I dont say this way of developing software is easily realizable, but I really do think it should work, at least in theory. But this theorical view, was tought to please the end user and then, should be appliable.

By the way, I (and i'm of course not the only one) really appreciate your work for JuK and taglib, among your others contributions.

Even with its nonstandards icons ;), Yammi (http://yammi.sourceforge.net) is a great music manager that uses XMMS (or noatun) as the player. So, all the XMMS plugins, file formats etc. are avaiable... Yammi also has a powerful fuzzy (tolerant) search function, wishlists and more.